Usha Vance, wife of Trump’s V-P pick J.D. Vance, takes stage at Republican convention
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Mrs Usha Vance, wife of vice-presidential nominee, Senator J.D. Vance, speaks on Day 3 of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee on July 17.
PHOTO: REUTERS
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MILWAUKEE - Mrs Usha Vance, introduced her husband at the Republican National Convention
Mrs Vance presented her 39-year-old husband as a “working-class guy” who had overcome childhood traumas to attend Yale Law School.
She described him as “a tough Marine who served in Iraq but whose idea of a good time was playing with puppies and watching the movie Babe”.
She compared her middle-class upbringing in San Diego with his experience growing up poor in Appalachia.
“That J.D. and I could meet at all, let alone fall in love and marry, is a testament to this great country,” Mrs Vance, 38, said. “It is also a testament to J.D.”
A litigator with degrees from Yale and Cambridge, Mrs Vance held judicial clerkships and worked in private practice before announcing on July 15 that she was resigning from her law firm, Munger, Tolles & Olson, to support her family during the campaign. The Vances have three children.
Mr and Mrs Vance met at Yale Law School, graduating in 2013.
Mrs Vance served as an editor of The Yale Law Journal and managing editor of the Yale Journal of Law & Technology, and participated in classes offering free legal advice on Supreme Court and media freedom issues.
She was a law clerk to Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts during the 2017 to 2018 term, when she helped research cases and write drafts of decisions.
Justice Roberts during that term authored a 5-4 ruling upholding Trump’s travel ban targeting several Muslim-majority countries.
In another ruling, Justice Roberts was in the 7-2 majority that backed a Christian baker who refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple.
Mrs Vance earlier was a law clerk in Kentucky for now 6th US Circuit Judge Amul Thapar, who Trump once considered for a Supreme Court vacancy. In 2014, she clerked on the D.C. Circuit for Judge Brett Kavanaugh, who was nominated by Trump and confirmed to the Supreme Court in 2018.
The daughter of Indian immigrants, Mrs Vance has been the target of racist attacks on the social media platform X since the July 15 announcement.
Mr Stew Peters, a far-right internet personality, posted a photo of the couple and wrote: “There is an obvious Indian coup taking place in the US right before our eyes.”
Mrs Vance said in a June television interview that she was raised in a religious household. Her parents are Hindu.
In that interview, she described her husband’s Senate bid in Ohio as a shock. “It was so different from anything we had done before,” she told Fox And Friends. “But it was an adventure.”
Mr Vance, author of the best-selling memoir Hillbilly Elegy,
In a 2017 NBC interview when she was 37 weeks pregnant with the couple’s first child, Mrs Vance described liking that her then friend J.D. was “very diligent” when they were assigned to work together on a brief in law school. “He would show up for these 9am appointments that I set for us to work on the brief together.”
Mr Vance said in that interview: “The thing I remember about Usha is how completely forward and confident with herself she was.”
At the convention on July 17, he called her “an incredible lawyer and a better mum”. REUTERS
